Given the other choices: the dictator continuing to refuse to acknowledge the crowd, or the dictator handing control of the dictatorship to his chief of torture and secret police, the army is the happy outcome for today. “The news reader is smiling,” Al Jazeera recounted, describing the state-television feed.

For today. Hosni Mubarak, in his intransigence, had insisted that he would not surrender power until September, when the elections were duly scheduled. Constitutional proceduralism was the last refuge of one-man government. But now he’s gone, and the procedures have gone with him. Parliament has reportedly been ”